


tired at sea

by mudfrog



Series: Dream SMP-verse [6]
Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Ballroom Dancing, Emotional Constipation, Implied/Referenced Mind Control, M/M, Sir Billiam Is Not Evil He Just Lacks Empathy (Video Blogging RPF), Sir Billiam-centric (Video Blogging RPF), Tales of the SMP: The Masquerade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-12 16:49:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29512746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mudfrog/pseuds/mudfrog
Summary: Sir Billiam and the Butler dance in the dark.-Sliding onto a stool, he swallows the dust in his mouth. Satisfaction burns going down, settles in the pit of his gut as he draws his robe closer to himself.The moon is a cheerful face which greets him, fitful fingers tumbling into ballroom through the thin, long panes, but the darkness comes from behind.“Do you hear it?”
Relationships: Sir Billiam/The Butler (Video Blogging RPF)
Series: Dream SMP-verse [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1987528
Comments: 22
Kudos: 128





	tired at sea

**Author's Note:**

> AN: these are characters unrelated to techno n ranboo, i tagged them because they were the ones playing the characters.

He is always speaking, the master. He says, _I_ , like a paperweight in his mouth, full of implicit meaning. 

_I_ , Sir Billiam. _I_ , Sir Billiam the Third. When the young master says, _I_ , people turn their head to listen, or is it only that he, sitting nameless in the dark, strains his ears to listen? Flits behind the grey-papered pillars of endless hallways to follow the dip and creak of the master’s voice. Sir Billiam the Third finds his own humour expansive, his sentences ballooning with sugar-sweet perfume. 

The butler had thought once, privately, when the lamps are turned to a low simmer, that the master is so full of air his very person feels in danger of drifting away. The only thing keeping his feet firmly on linoleum tiles are the gold lining his pockets, the glittering trim of his waistcoat, the fine silver embroidery of his shoes. 

Then he had admonished himself, very loudly, for thinking so. 

Loyalty is a pretty word, pulled from a prettier mouth. He had traded his name for shelter, and now he lives like a ghost, haunting the forest mansion. 

The Butler owes Sir Billiam so much.

The details of which are unimportant, unimportant enough that he’s forgotten them. 

The sickly yellow pump of the shroomlights wars against rich, black roots, splitting cobble and brick. Far from the damp basements of the mansion, the secret room is always dry, smells as crisp as a sunny winter day. The master breathes and the red vines rejoice. His hair is mussed, long, pale strands tumbles from his shoulders when he moves to sit, swaying against the foliage. There are cords of thin, red lines around his legs, crawled up his arms. His black overcoat is crumpled underneath him. He’d fallen asleep down here again. 

_“_ Butle _r,”_ sullen, childlike, a starkly pale arm raises towards him, like all the blood had been drained from him in the night. Sir Billiam cranes his head theatrically to watch the leaves grown overhead, “I have been entrapped. Please excavate me from these vines,” the master pauses, “ _Immediately_.” 

The butler, Butler- his head pounds. The pain swells worse when he nods jerkily, he reaches out to peel prickling branches from the master’s sleeve. There had to be something more before the master stole it away- 

No, no, Sir Billiam would never do that- before he traded it away. “Can’t think of that now,” he mutters under his breath, softening the hard consonants of his words, when he hears the master click his tongue in exasperation above him. “Okay, okay.” 

There used to be another one here. 

He had a name, it sat like a sweet fizzling on the master’s tongue. 

_“No need to be so violent, Hubert,”_ the lyrical croon of the master’s voice, when they pressed him into the small alcove behind the fireplace. Even the slightest exertion made him heave, Hubert would offer the master a gentle arm, and he would fetch the wine. Listening to the sputter of the oil lamps when the dark crept into the halls, listening to the whistle of the wind as it smothered the firepit. _“No need to be so violent,”_

It stands to reason then, that he had a name too. 

They say the body mourns, even when the mind doesn’t remember. His eyes are sticky-sore, his skin is waxen under the flare of the bathroom lights. The master would sweep into the mansion on the most lonesome of days, travelling coat dropped on the side of the doors. The wind bit into the apples of his cheeks, bruised pink, his face sallow, like he had walked for days through the old, solitary forest, when the butler knew it was only that he had been starved from staying so long away. He only notices how his skin hangs off the sharp jut of his bones when he sees the master, only holes himself beneath the bathroom’s mirror, thumbing at the bruised pouch of his eyelids. The butler feels ravenous, there is an aching pit in his stomach that will not go away. 

The mansion lives in stasis. 

He cleans, he reads, he watches the Egg. There is no grime between the stoves, the meat frozen to rot. 

He’s never felt so hungry than when the master is home. 

* * *

Billiam takes care to shut the piano every night. He walks down the grand stairs, and moving into the ballroom, snaps it close with a flick of his wrist. The heavy hardwood lid crashes against the outer rim, battering polished black paint along the edge. The chords tremble with the keys in a cacophony, bouncing along stone brick walls; Billiam waits for it to fall apart every night, for its thin legs to snap, for the white and black teeth to clench down so hard it scatters into pieces along the dark floors. 

It doesn’t. 

In the hotbox that makes the mansion, when the lights are blown out, it plays a jolly tune. The notes coalesce onto the high ceilings, gets caught in the cobwebs that dust the corners of the chamber. There are wine stains faded into the wooden engravings of the walls, that Billiam turns a blind eye to. 

He enters the ballroom and closes the doors behind him; the piano keys bang in offended outcry. 

The upper middle class is indistinguishable from the poor when they’re dead. All of them make the same racket. 

The night air is tar, leaking from the roof, banging against the wide windows, scratches into the ornate glass like a wounded dog, begging to be let in. The sash of his sleep robe trails red in his wake, his toes curling into the carpets. He stands in its belly, tips his head to upwards, to the void of the towering ceiling behind hand-painted stars, awash in grayscale by the moon. The bar at the end of the chamber flickers feebly, almost an invitation. A dull fear worms at the well of his throat, waiting, almost, for the darkness to plunge inwards, to take him in whole, and for nothing to say that he's ever held title on the grounds. It wedges a splinter into him, past flesh and organ. He aches with the terror of the forgotten. 

A dry palm cups the small of his back, through the silk of his robes. _Come along-_ Billiam moves along, leaving shades behind him in an empty ballroom. Beyond the windows, the treeline is an assortment of blurry black shapes, clothed in illicit moonlight. Even the wind behaves when the moon is full. 

Sliding onto a stool, he swallows the dust in his mouth. Satisfaction burns going down, settles in the pit of his gut as he draws his robe closer to himself. 

The moon is a cheerful face which greets him, fitful fingers tumbling into ballroom through the thin, long panes, but the darkness comes from behind. 

“Do you hear it?” 

The butlers under Sir Billiam’s employ have never been the queerest things inhabiting his estate. When whittled down to one, they become a contender. This one is only tolerable when Billiam can't see him, when he boxes his voice small, modulated. He is most tolerable when there are guests, and Billiam gets to tell him to be quiet. His hand goes to the inside of his wrist where his skin is thinnest, his veins throb red, illuminated in crossroads. 

They only appear in the dark, lightning scars on the curve of his stomach, running between his shoulder blades. He wipes his thumb along raised skin, his heartbeat slow in his ears. 

The Egg doesn’t speak to him. 

Speaking is difficult, for a lustful, lethargic god. There isn’t reason to expend influence over something that is already... 

“But _ler_ ," he says in a surly, airy drawl, so softened by the late hour that his voice becomes dull steel, rather than the striking edge of a rapier, "I do _not_ recall sayin' you could join me.” 

It is perhaps because of this, that the Butler slinks across the bar, dressed in his evening uniform. 

His tweed vest fall over the long angles of his waist, not even the buttoned collar could hide the awkward gape of his clothes. Under the light, he looks like he is eating into himself, the cuffs of his sleeves are specked with dirt and mud, his gloves ill-fitting. There is a strength corded into his elongated, stick-thin arms, and it isn't elegant, only barbaric. It paints such a ghastly image of his estate that for one suffocating moment, Billiam sees himself, ash-streaked, holding damn all. His irritation embraces him warmly, he swallows the sour pit lodged in his throat. 

The Butler places a small glass of white wine by the curl of his fist. It's a gesture brought on by habit rather than deference, iced starlight sitting at the bottom of the glass. Billiam doesn't even _drink_ but for occasions; he tips it over with a shift of his fingers, watching it spill over the edge dispassionately. 

He claps his hands together once, " _Well_ ," he says, tonguing his words carefully, running his thoughts by his imminent reintroduction into polite society, to slip into a hostile crowd of simpering men and their rules, "I suppose I shall be goin' off tomorrow." 

Just as the Butler, watching the wine drip with nothing on his face, says, "Preparations aren't complete." 

It’s a blank canvas of a face, it tells no meaningful story. His cheekbones melt into his jaw, his lips are cracked, there is blood bubbling past the thin, peeling skin. 

The face of an NPC. 

_That's a lie,_ nags the bitter fire at the back of his mind. It’s an unwelcome intrusion that has nothing to do with the Egg. He knows the lines of the Butler’s face as he knows his own lifeline, etched into the soft meat of his palm- 

His hand against the stool's back, he turns to look at the Butler to find that the bar stands empty. Water wells at the faucet of the first barrel. 

He lifts his head to the ceiling, doesn’t sigh because it would be uncouth. 

“We will be doin' it how we always do it." he says, in aristocratic derision, "You just have to sit there... and wait for me to come back." 

The Butler is crouched at his feet. There is a creaking, doubtful noise, where he braces himself against his knee, dabbing at the wine stain with a rag- he keeps a rag on his person? Oh, Billiam is going to hurl. 

“Dancing lessons." the Butler says, voice kept small, but not small enough. Something he can’t parse flitting across the angles of that unseemly face. The Butler pushes himself to stand, dropping the damp rag onto the counter. There is a light behind his eyes that burn, and Billiam could almost imagine there to be intelligent thought behind them. And yet! Too much eye contact is happening - he tips his head to stare at where the carpet is darkened with spilled wine, takes one, haughty step away onto dryer pastures until the next question freezes him still. "... Would you, teach me?" 

His eyes flick over the Butler’s figure. 

Billiam rarely finds himself off-kilter. Practice guides a steady hand, and Billiam has had more than enough practice, at preparing, at seeking, and the creeping, quiet, distance, that seem to grow the longer he stays, in this very small, very cozy manor, it helps. In the long, long years, _dancing lessons-_ the Butler has never once asked for. 

Bafflement pressing his voice thin, he says, “I do not see why you would need to learn anythin',” he gestures, fingers tearing through the spirits that perch around him, “You won’t be dancin’, you’ll be servin’ up refreshments... pies... cakes." 

“What if you need a dancing partner?” the Butler presses. 

He wrinkles his nose. He has never _needed_ a dancing partner, “I would choose someone who isn’t _poor_.” 

The Butler moves. 

Under certain light, the one remaining butler of Sir Billiam’s mansion seem to stretch himself taller than human. The very tip of his jagged fingernails graze the floors, his head hang low on his shoulders to keep from lighting his hair on the chandeliers. This is not now. Here and now, the clouds filter through the window panes, a shadow passes over the grooves of his face. He is simply a man, simply the Butler, taller than he has to be. 

Billiam blinks- and standing closer than the procedural arm-length away. Billiam still has to tip his head to look him in the eye. It's extremely aggravating. If he could order the Butler to shrink himself down, he would, but that would come at the expense of his immaculate, diamond posture. 

He holds up a stern finger. 

The Butler works nervous creases into his white gloves, holding his own hand. “Anything for the masquerade,” he says, “For the Egg.” 

Guardian is a strange word, but it’s the only one Billiam can swallow, locked in his ribcage. His displeasure is soothed away by the reminder, reluctantly enamoured in the romance of his duty. Academics weave stories of a monstrous creator, flaying their acolytes down to muscle and sinew. Olympian gods are mercenary in their flaws, fashioned for self-destruction. It’s different on ink-stained parchment, it’s different when Lichtenberg figures start to bleed.

Possession is a cheap word for metamorphosis. He doesn’t think on the Egg, the same way he doesn’t think on breathing, or blinking, the same way he doesn’t think about his body. 

He runs his tongue over the sharp edge of his upper teeth, stares at the sky. 

“… that is true.” he replies. 

A draft must’ve blown the doors open, if only just a sliver. Where the hall is flooded in streaks of pale light, its gray stone walls turned ivory, the foyer is a lurching, advancing pit. The abyss drains from the balcony above to creep inwards, with it the chill. The piano plays a sweet, even tune, under the cheeky fingers of a weak-hearted ghost, in a sly giraffe mask. He knows the dead are laughing. 

Rolling his eyes, he holds his arms out. 

“Okay, okay,” the Butler whispers, sounding out of breath, his hands reach for Billiam’s shoulder, “My- where do I put my-?” 

His eyes bulge, “Butler,” he sways out of reach. “Do not touch me.” 

The Butler withdraws quickly. 

“The lead,” Billiam says at last, placing artificial emphasis with a long-favoured rise in inflection, “Takes a step forward with his left foot,” He curves his arm under the Butler’s, close enough that he can almost pick at the frayed threads of his clothes, but takes a special care to keep a hair’s breadth apart. Says, “Your hand goes on my shoulder,” 

His eyes are at level to the dip of a thin, skeletal throat, he watches the Butler swallow mutely. He wishes absently that he had his shoes, a hand flutters along the curve of his shoulder, straying to the bend of his neck. 

“Take one step back, with your right foot.” 

He can almost hear the Butler’s thundering pulse underneath the rounded notes of the piano’s song, when he bows, and makes his way to start the dance. Their hands, held up, resting apart. 

The Butler is cold. 

A chill emanates from him that Billiam can feel through his clothes, it travels to the soles of his feet. He is watching Billiam, very seriously, there are lines around his eyes, made of worry, made of stress and fatigue. 

“Bend your legs in the close.” he mutters, turning his head away, to stare at the clean stitching of the Butler’s front vest, rather than his face. 

It is a rather ugly face. 

There had never been a fireplace built in the ballroom, he thinks. It would certainly be an appropriate addition in its prime, but the mansion is no place of merriment, no place to hold festivals nor parties. It is a secluded creature, sequestered from the rest of the world, made so on purpose when it had been built. The bar is proof enough of its practicality, now a sinister silhouette at the end of the room, their footwork watched by an encroaching darkness, and the striking eye of the young moon. 

The Butler smells like the old forests, like pine cones tossed into the fires to be burned alongside skin and bones. Billiam chews at the inside of his cheek- focus on the dance. He takes a measured step to the rising tune of a phantom’s recital, forward, back. Like the pages of books whose spines have never been cracked open, welded to the manor’s sprawling library. He notes distantly, that their piano man is a delinquent, eager to push the song faster, to lose the beat. Its notes runs fast, faster, vicious in its glee.

Billiam is too good a dancer to fall for it.

A weight bears down onto his forgotten sash. 

The Butler isn’t. 

He is pinned to place by a heavy foot, grabbed from his turn. He lets out a sharp, reproving exhale, “Do not touch me!” above the frantic apology of incomprehensible noise, garbled out by his ear. Rushed and hot, the Butler’s scrambles to step off his clothes, his eyes perfectly round to Billiam’s narrowed glower. 

“Right, right,”

“Oh my god.” he says shortly, barely audible in the jumble of the piano’s pitter-patter keys. His shoulders rise and slope in an exhale, and he proclaims, in pronounced, gossamer-thin syllables, “Butler,” waits for the apprehensive murmur of acknowledgement. “Do not get peer pressured into followin’ the music. You are so _extremely_ weak-willed,” 

“Mm-hmmm-hm, mm-hm.” 

“It is difficult,” he begins, to the mirthful new note of the song, taking a step away, “To have... the, ah, demeanour of a noble man, such as myself,” 

There is a movement of light over dark hair, the Butler must be nodding, he’s pressed his hands against the sides of his slacks, if gloves weren’t in the way, Billiam suspects that he’d be drenched in sweat. 

Horrifying. 

“But you will simply have to try.” his arms are in a loose half-embrace, curled around empty air.

The piano bangs, shakes the dust in the air that he can see faces twist and quiver beyond the wooden pillars. His temper flares underneath his tongue. When he takes his step, it is to tear a wound open. He turns his heels with a moderate pace, down to the bow of his knees. Billiam, in adolescence, had his knuckles sore from the rattan cane, the prickly end rapping tightly against his back, to be ironed straight and kept perfectly intact. 

Routine. 

He counts, he watches the Butler. He counts all over again, to have his toes bury into the fuzz of the carpet. Listening to discordant keys clicking, impudent and ear-splitting. It’s a tantrum – the manor should know that Billiam is the only one allowed to throw tantrums here. 

A crash charges throughout the manor like a scream, the moon disappears. 

It’s a cloudless sky. Soundless defiance comes from the half-open door, the desolate balcony above them. A yawning, parted silence. 

“They’ve broken the piano.” the Butler whispers, from somewhere behind him. 

“About time,” he replies, without inflection. 

It takes barely seconds, that his eyes adjust, spots blooming when he watches, apathetic, the direction of the wide, twin doors. It becomes a wait, staring motionless into the gulf between his own manor, and the rats that haunt it. His thumb brushes over the flowers sewn into the cuff of his sleeves, he smoothens down his robes, but there is not a single sound that clatters, not a single groan of the manor's floors. The Butler must be just as frozen, mouth sealed shut behind his long fingers.

Billiam won’t turn to look. 

They have spent their time in the dark, this selfish pitch-blackness, the Butler ought to _know_.

And then- 

And then. 

Drawn from the balcony, a slow, defeated tune, twisted up and morose. 

Smug satisfaction curls around the line of his lip, he turns to put his hand in a gentle mimicry over a thin shoulder, where he is close enough to see the simple bronze button of the Butler’s crooked collar. It is a dark gray spot in their Stygian crypt, he can see nothing else but the allusion of his family crest, branded onto the metal. The thing about memories, they will always demand your time. Billiam counts them, a long, endless list of names, tucked away on crinkled parchment underneath his mattress. 

“Now you lead,” he murmurs.

The Butler nods, there is a quiet breath to his right, and the song begins again. 

It is a little difficult, to dance this way. Not for Billiam, of course; Billiam, listening to the rustling of the Butler's trousers, the soft shuffle of his shoes, counts their footwork together. The Butler is easy to follow, when he mouths his numbers, the quiet trip of his tongue against the roof of his mouth when he says his _twos, threes._ The moon will not return, this Billiam knows. Melancholy rings hollow above them before sinking down, ebbing into their push and pull. The world is not only his; they are all similarly bound, even the dead have their privileges. There are small mistakes, where the Butler's left hand twitched to hold his, skims across the ticklish centre of his palm. He can pretend it is the others, the misshapen crew behind him. If he opens his eyes wide, he can pretend he sees them, that he isn't blinded.

The Butler is here.

Billiam knows his name, doesn't he? The final one, Billiam must know his name.

He is too busy, too engrossed to read the faces that slide behind the potted foliage and flora, that he doesn’t see it coming. The Butler’s hand moves slowly. It presses gently against his side, barely there, he snaps back to the Butler’s face, just as a broad palm flattens tentatively around his waist. It was his mistake, here. 

His mistake that he is so stunned, that he gasps against the Butler’s jaw. The shudder runs through him like a bolt, his breath contracting his chest. His thoughts are in shambles, narrowed down to the grooves of the Butler’s calloused fingers, how it grasps lightly onto his silken cloth. How it is not the alien touch of a dead man, numbing in its absence, how it is warm, how it _hurts._ He feels the Butler bend at his waist to pull him gently, like working out a sore limb, he wants, badly, to seize down on the Butler’s shoulder _._

“You should stay.” the Butler says; he sounds scraped raw, his words awkward, unfamiliar, and Billiam wishes he could _see_. 

The word shores up against him, crowds him into the Butler's chest.

He doesn’t move to touch, even if he could. The Butler smells like pine cones, it comes stronger where his hair curls at his neck. Billiam had raised his hand to reflect the Butler's, they had put them so closely together. It seems like nothing, it seems so easy. His arm is beginning to strain. "Is that what this entire thing’s been about?” he hisses waspishly, lets fury coil around him to smother his distress. But his words, picked thoroughly in the air with a saccharine levity befitting of his station, quivers in time with the lingering crescendo, the echo burrowing into the far corners. 

The Butler is consumed by triviality. The Butler always wants him to stay, makes this cavern as inviting as a spider’s embrace. Billiam comes to a stop, breathing heavily, “You know I cannot stay,” 

“Stay with the Egg,” comes the Butler’s voice, no longer so muffled between them, a certainty hardened his voice into wistful patience. He is cajoling; Billiam notices, too late, that there is a hand wrapped around his wrist, around- “Stay _here_.” 

Around the vines that writhe in him.

The Egg is a goliath, it gives as it takes. He feels cold, he said _do not touch_ , it will end up the same way. He wants to, he wants to _,_ it leaves him gasping shallowly into a warm collarbone. There are trenches engraved on the Egg's unyielding shell, serpentine troughs paint a puzzle in an old, distinguished script, he knows every spiral, and he traces their contortions onto the Butler's skin with his eyes. He cannot _stay; it will starve._ “I do _not_ have to talk to you,” he says, weaves his fingers between the Butler’s plastic, gloved hands. “You are- poor, you are not a _person, y_ ou are already _gone._ ” 

He cranes his neck, to look at the blank canvas of a face, how the abyss takes its piece to leave smooth planes. In the Butler’s marble eyes, he sees himself mirrored. Red pinprick pupils slid snug into his blooming irises, like he had been devoured from the inside, and the suit is his skin, fostering something revered. 

He doesn’t see the Butler dwelling in them, cannot see the man anymore. 

“Butler,” he swallows, words squirming against the roof of his mouth, it hangs tremulously between the black gaze of the Butler’s midnight stare, and the soft arch of his bottom lip. “I’m tired of lookin’ at you.” 

The silence edges into the room with little grace.

He thinks, aptly, about James. He thinks of picking berry bushes until their hands are bloodied with cuts, sharing a bottle of cold milk under the summer sun. He had reached out, indulgent, to adjust the crooked tilt of the crescent mask _,_ hears _old friend_ come tumbling out of his mouth. 

He thinks about wanting regret to glide quick and sharp into the space between his ribs, or a plastic sentimentality that he might read in one of the many romantic stories entrenched in his expensive tomes, yearning which would draw old poets to tears. He thinks about something other than the resounding, terrible silence, the utter _lack,_ the blank space. He had bent on one knee to adjust the crooked tilt of the crescent mask, waiting for wither roses to flower in his lungs. 

Billiam thinks about how he had stared down at the body of an old friend, and thought, _well, James arrived to the masquerade in suspenders_ ; the man was already dead. 

Time is an awfully complicated thing. When he next looks up, he is alone.

Billiam is the Egg’s keeper, and the Butler is food, but they are being digested just the same. The carpets know the shape of his footsteps. They play it back to him when he is alone, that if he lay down to press his ears to the cold, stone steps, he could feel the pulse of the house reverberate with the roaring in his ears. He wonders if he will even know if he is gone.

He closes his eyes. 

He would rather spend time in his favourite room. 

**Author's Note:**

> sir bEELIEM


End file.
